Free The Children of Silence by Linda Stratmann Page A

young men, and he was currently delivering the same delightful treat in London, where he had become all the rage of a set of Chelsea poets.
    Cedric had already attended several performances of Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan’s acclaimed Patience at the Opéra Comique. Having enthused about the delicious greenery-yallery of the decor, Mr George Grossmith’s velvet knee-britches and Japanese attitudes and the resplendent uniforms of the Dragoon Guards, he insisted on providing tickets for Frances, Sarah and Professor Pounder for what he promised was the gayest night to be had in London.
    Frances was particularly interested since there had been several letters to The Times and the Chronicle from the minor and uncelebrated Bayswater poet Augustus Mellifloe, insisting that the character of Reginald Bunthorne was modelled upon himself; the fact that the piece was intended to be a satire having entirely escaped him.
    ‘I shall never write poetry,’ said Cedric, ‘it is far too exhausting. And Mr Mellifloe will never write poetry either, because he cannot.’
    Cedric, for all his protestations of idleness and habitually languid manner, was actually a devotee of the manly art of pugilism as taught by Professor Pounder’s sporting academy, an exercise to which he brought both energy and finesse. When urgent action was required, he was as vigorous and active as any man in London.
    It was a joyous evening, despite the hot and heavy atmosphere produced by the crowded theatre and the gas lamps. To Frances’ amusement one of the songs immortalised the skills of a private detective, Ignatius ‘Paddington’ Pollaky, and Cedric said he hoped that one day she too would be celebrated in song.
    Sarah’s comment was that she could not see why the twenty lovesick maidens so doted on the namby-pamby poets when they might better have admired the muscular Dragoon Guards, and Cedric could only agree. Professor Pounder said nothing, but then he was a man of few words.
    Frances was not very familiar with the world of the theatre but reflected that it was in some ways a miniature of life. Everyone on the stage was an actor pretending to be what he or she was not, and did not everyone do that all the time, including even herself? She tried her best to be honest but it was not always possible. She still awoke, perspiring, from those horrid nightmares, yet outwardly pretended that the brutal attack which she had only survived unscathed due to the intervention of Sarah’s firm fists, but which she seemed doomed to relive again and again, had not shaken her. She professed no more than curiosity about her absent mother, yet it was a constant and consuming mystery.
    Frances also observed that the musical piece, though light, included double deceptions: not only was the actor Mr Rutland Barrington pretending to be idyllic poet Archibald Grosvenor but Grosvenor himself, at a moment’s notice, threw off what proved to be a pretence of which he had wearied and became what he wanted to be, a ‘commonplace young man’. In one very amusing scene the Dragoons donned aesthetic garments in an attempt to win the ladies but thankfully soon reverted to their uniforms. How much might be achieved with costume, Frances thought. How easy it was to put off one set of apparel and don another, and be seen differently by the world, which only took notice of exterior show.

C HAPTER S IX
    F rances’ appointment with Dr Goodwin was at ten o’clock the next morning and this gave her the opportunity of rising early to visit the offices of the Bayswater Chronicle , which, apart from a tendency to sensationalise the commonplace and wallow in the sensational, was one of the more accurate periodicals. The detailed accounts of the arguments that so frequently broke out at meetings of the Paddington Vestry was one of the best guides to matters of public concern, as well as being very amusing. She was often assisted in her endeavours by the paper’s most active reporter, Mr Max